Hey, Jane Lynch and PETA. Thanks for caring, but your letter appealing to Atlanta Pride to move the kickoff party for the safety of marine life is off base. So says the Georgia Aquarium in an official response. Lynch’s letter picked up the PETA banner from last year, when the animal rights group’s gay VP went to the annual Pride kickoff at the aquarium and asserted – loudly and nationally – that the decible level from gay Atlanta’s big throwdown of DJ beats and thousands of screaming queens was “torture” to the animals housed there. The popular lesbian actress created a shitstorm of community comments Friday with her letter to Atlanta Pride Managing Director Buck Cooke and Pride’s response to punt the concerns to the aquarium. Many sided with Lynch and added harsh critiques of Pride and the aquarium. Scott Higley, vice president of marketing & communications at the Georgia Aquarium, issued an official response on Friday evening.

"We think that Ms. Lynch, who is a friend of ours and visited our facility with her family in the summer of 2011 (photo), has been given some inaccurate and distorted information by a particular animal rights extremist group with questionable credibility and a history of public relations stunts, which is unfortunate. “She has never attended the event for which she is advocating a move, so she would not know how we strictly monitor music volume and sound levels – levels which were determined and are strictly monitored based on what the scientific community knows about the hearing thresholds in certain marine mammals. So we’ll certainly give her the benefit of the doubt! In any case, when given the facts, I’m certain she will understand that even during the events we hold here in our state-of-the-art facility, the world’s largest aquarium, our animal care experts (with a combined hundreds of years of experience in caring for aquatic animals) always place the welfare and well-being of our animals first."